From ‘You’re Doing It Wrong — My Life As A Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard)’
In the murky world of music, the romanticised allure of illegal substances is almost inescapable. Rock biographies often troop down the tired road of detailing drug use as a serious problem for the artist, or as a catalyst for their destruction in excruciating matter of fact detail. Or fall prey to lionising drugs, presenting them as the very things that bulldozed an artist’s musical boundaries, allowing them to experience a new realm of creative freedom, before eventually consuming them, or causing bits of their bodies to fall off from being so full of drugs.
My mid-00s indie punk band We Are The Physics did all of that completely wrong.
We weren’t particularly druggy people. Even though the freneticism, energy, and irritating confusion of our live shows meant people would genuinely ask us where we could find speed like that, it wasn’t really something we’d been into. I’d always personally been pretty terrified of drugs, having seen what that life did to people around me, and the remnants of their usage would still circle the music industry in the form of rattled ghosts who couldn’t remember anything about themselves, or would recall blurred moments of their life as if picked from the ether, unsure if they lived it or watched it.
But even as teenagers, we’d go to each other’s houses and flats to spend Saturday nights hopped up on Irn Bru and fizzy sweeties rather than drugs and, to a much lesser extent, alcohol. It felt like alcohol was there on the periphery, we would drink now and then, but it was never the focus of our night — that felt like too far a step into adulthood, and we weren’t ready to make that leap into growing up yet.
I actually gave up drinking at the age of 18, which is practically a pensioner in Glaswegian terms. Glasgow’s drinking culture always held court as a huge slice of the city’s personality, alongside casual violence, sectarianism, and saying ‘how’ when meaning ‘why’. Like most port towns, Glasgow’s relationship with booze has been ingrained into the fabric of its people, and it’s not uncommon to start downing drinks as early teenagers. Glasgow routinely had the highest rate of alcohol related deaths per 100,000 population, and this seemed rarely a deterrent, because those numbers were just a big, blurry mess when you were drunk.
By 18, I was done with it — I’d seen what it had done to members of my close family, I’d seen what arseholes they had become. I’d heard enough about my extended family, about my uncle’s uncle who was left to die in the back garden by his own son after they had a drunken argument and went outside to finish it. I’d watched my own da ooze his way around the house on the floor, his legs dragged behind him like keelhauled corpses, vomit stalactites on his chin, gurning ‘Help me, son’. I’d grown up in the east end of Glasgow and saw the quick, gaunt stick men, yellowed by the DTs and worse, with no meat on their bones, blown up the streets by the biting wind on their way back to the Bellgrove Hotel, a privately-owned homeless shelter on the Gallowgate, known for its Dickensian squalor. It housed these men who dripped alcohol from their pores, and hope fell with it, and I just never wanted to be that.
I found that I didn’t really get drunk very easily, and I’d go from feeling absolutely normal to mind-numbingly morose. To top it all off, and I should probably write this in the whisperiest tone possible — I didn’t even really like the taste of alcohol. Beer just tasted like fizzy bread. So if I was getting no positive effects from it whatsoever, I decided it wasn’t for me.
However, that was unacceptable in Glasgow. There had to be a reason. Like when you’re asked to explain a tattoo, you were expected to unfurl a tale that justified teetotalism. Surely nobody wouldn’t drink unless there was a life-threatening reason not to.
Being that way in Glasgow was basically self-ostracisation. Any time I was around people I didn’t know and admitted to not drinking — and I say admit because it was usually a truth yanked involuntarily from my body through interrogation — it had to be justified.
“Are you driving?”
“Are you off it after a bender?”
“Are you doing pills later?”
“Are you feeling alright? Are you on medication right now?”
The probing into your reasons had no societal boundaries because it was almost unknown territory, viewed at best with curiosity, and at worst with suspicion. Not drinking rendered you a potential spy, a snitch, someone who’d relay the information and detail of what happened that night back to others. You became a liability, a loose end. Nobody could relax around you.
I never judged anyone for drinking, though. Often, in fact, I’d envy that they could partake without the unfathomable fear and self-loathing I’d routinely encounter afterwards. What not drinking did for me, however, was make nights out seem unbearably long. Being around drunk people when I wasn’t drunk was really fucking boring. They were boring, or I was bored because I wasn’t drunk, and either way I would’ve rather have been at home listening to music, watching the telly, or looking at cats.
So, we were content with sweeties. And we hammered all sorts — Haribo, chocolate, those terrible fucking fizzy laces from Aldi. The more sugar, the more artificial-tasting, the better.
Our parents would sometimes buy us in cheap sweeties from the supermarket, before leaving a group of us in for the night. Michael Drum, the stoic drummer of our little band, told us once that his mother had casually remarked to her friend that she supplied her son and his pals — we were late teenagers at the time — with fizzy drinks and sweeties for our Saturday nights at his house in Cumbernauld. Her friend scoffed in disbelief.
“You really think all they’re taking is sweeties?” she’d laughed.
But, yeah, that’s all we were taking. We’d eat sweeties, watch MTV and movies, then wait until around 4am to grab a cheap, rickety camcorder we’d stolen from the brother of Michael Guitar (our band’s guitarist, incidentally) to make a film in which we played multiple characters. We’d wait until the deathly hours of the morning because then we could safely go outside, head up to the brutalist monstrosity of the Cumbernauld Town Centre just as it was getting light, and be as loud, immature, and daft as possible, without the fear of being challenged by Cumbernauld’s finest young teams, who deemed what we were doing childish and embarrassing, and potentially an offence punished by a big stabbing.
Occasionally, we’d see some ghoulish remnants of nightclubs, ejected from their dark boxes attempting to stumble home, jackets half off and their shoes in hand. These were people we knew, or went to school with, and they’d be wobbling on the horizon like a VHS on pause. They’d be heading to the comforting normality of their childhood pillows to sleep off the night while we’d spent it having a shoe-kicking competition on the roof of Tesco, as a sub-plot to a movie we were trying to cobble together.
We ended up making around a hundred movies, most of which had exactly the same plot — a masked killer entered a house of unsuspecting party dwellers. We even made a slasher franchise called Kill, whose predictably silent masked assailant was called John Killer.
We made 100 films, I didn’t say they were good films.
We tried to branch out and make a sci-fi movie called Spaceship, but Michael Drum’s family returned home earlier than we’d expected and caught us wearing plastic basins on our heads, with his family’s shoes on our feet and our hands because that seemed futuristic, so we never finished it. I was mortified. It takes a moment like that, to shine a light on the world you’ve created for yourself, for you to realise how out of step you are with everyone. I remember his younger siblings laughing at us, at how ridiculous and embarrassing it was for them and that surely we too should be embarrassed. And that sense of shame drew a line under making films, because it was time to grow up again. Or at least choose a societally-acceptable age-appropriate way to spend our Saturdays.
There really wasn’t any difference between us and our schoolmates who were playing dress-up as drunk adults and stumbling home from the park, or the gangs of young teams huddled together in an underpass, other than their attempt to transcend the mundanity and confusion of their post-adolescent lives was seen as ‘growing up’, and being adult, or a justifiable transition to that point. Whereas getting hyped up on sugar and buying a watermelon to act as a prop of someone’s head we could smash up for the fourth film in a horror franchise that we wouldn’t let anybody watch is seen as, I don’t know, the opposite? Maybe it was time to adapt our personalities. Maybe it was time we got into drugs, then.
The mythos of the music industry is that it was teeming with easy access to these substances, and there was an element of truth to that. Most people around us were using to some extent — my god, our tour manager Gary was often so coked out of his nut he was impossible to talk to. A variety of folks who drove us around the country were so desperately fuelled by drugs in elaborate ways that it became easier, and more rebellious, not to partake.
One of them drove us all the way to Brighton, parked in a secluded spot, and opened up a secret compartment in the back of the van that unveiled the most elaborate, complicated bong set-up I’d ever seen. Honestly, it looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory, complete with bubbling beakers. He proceeded to unravel a massive tube, like the innards of a whale, and extend it as far out of the van as possible to show us how he could get high off this contraption from extremely far away.
Another time, we’d hired a van and I sat up front with Gary. He’d been incredibly on time to pick me up, but as I climbed in, he wasn’t his usual jovial self.
“You ready for this?” I said, knowing we had a long drive ahead of us during which time I’d keep him company by falling asleep while he’d keep me cold by having the window permanently open to exhale smoke from his four million cigarettes. In anticipation, I’d wrapped my arms around my body in a hug to prevent heat escaping my soul. But he scratched at his hair, snowing dandruff on the passenger seat giving me a white first frost to sit on.
“There’s a wee flashing light!” he said, pointing at the dashboard.
I didn’t know anything about vans, or flashing lights, or dashboards, so I just tried my best to look concerned. Gary had recently crashed one of these vans into a bollard in Leicester and instead of stopping to inspect the damage, he just kept driving over it and we could hear each inch move underneath the van, etching its devastation on the underside, as we bumped over it like a fairground ride. So, after having to pay out for the damage that caused, he was wary about this light.
“What do you think that means?” I asked, and Gary shrugged.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure Gary even knew how to drive. He once told us he knew how to fly an afterburner jet because he’d read the Wikipedia article on it, and while that self-assuredness was quite endearing, I’d also wonder if Gary would just say ‘yes’ to any question about his skills and then figure it out later. I think that was exactly how Gary found himself driving around a band, someone had just asked him if he could do it, and he agreed. It was the opposite of my approach to life, which was to instantly decline anything even if I wanted to do it because it may have eaten into my valuable time spent sitting doing nothing and thinking about other things. I admire those who do, because I simply do not.
He tapped at the light on the dashboard and said “Red bad” like a caveman discovering blood. I sat there in the snowy passenger seat just staring down at the light, flashing red. It certainly seemed bad. Red’s usually bad. Sometimes they’d give a little visual indicator as to what the problem was — a flashing F for fuel or something like that. But it was just a constant flashing red LED.
Gary leaned over and threw his fist straight at the glove compartment in a punch and it fell open, like that was how it was meant to be accessed. He dug around inside and found the instruction manual but as he yanked it out, a tiny brown fragment accompanied it and dropped on my foot.
“What was that?” he asked urgently.
I peered down, “Looks like a wee bit of shit.”
He stared straight at it, “Is that a bit of hash?”
I lifted my foot slowly upwards, my arms still wrapped round my body in anticipation of the chills. I served it up closer to his face and he just let it come at him like a parent spooning him food.
As it got closer, he started sniffing.
“It looks like a bit of hash,” he said, excitedly, “It smells like a bit of hash.”
“It looks like a wee pebble,” I said, my foot still raised towards his face.
The tiny rock was honestly less than 1cm in diameter, it could’ve been a bit of dirt from someone’s boot, but Gary was insistent. He dabbed at it with his big sweaty finger and placed it in the centre of his palm.
“I think it’s a bit of hash,” he said again.
“You don’t know what that is!” I said, “It could actually just be a wee bit of shit.”
He brought it closer to his eyes, which crossed as he stared at this minuscule celestial body in the universal spirals and folds of his hand.
“I’m gonnae smoke it,” he said, and I burst out laughing. He seemed genuinely hurt, and that made me stop quite abruptly.
“It’s a bit of fucking dirt!” I said, incredulous.
“No, I’ve witnessed something along these lines before, my fine friend,” he said, trying to sound like the Poirot of wee bits of dirt, “It’s hash!”
And maybe he was right, I wouldn’t know, I’d spent my youth wearing a basin on my head pretending to be from the future.
He placed the tiny rock in the cup holder on the dashboard, and there it remained as we drove off, a protected passenger. If he could’ve put a seat belt on it, he would’ve. He’d glance it at from time to time, and reiterate out loud that he thought it was hash. We didn’t find out what the red light was for because Gary was just so focused on this wee bit of shit, sitting on the mantelpiece of the van like a trophy.
Unfortunately, the red light had certainly meant something, but as we careered down the motorway towards our destination, all had seemed fine. Until we found ourselves travelling past cars whose passengers would frantically wave at us.
“Look at these fucking clowns,” Gary would say, aggressively eyeing the passing cars, “Never seen a van before?” They would roll down their windows and mouth words, but we couldn’t hear over the roar of the engine, and Gary’s eternally loud Radio 4 documentaries on afterburner jets.
Gary would just wave back, and roll up the window again. After the third or fourth passing car that tried to get our attention, Gary’s paranoia started to kick in.
He turned down the radio, and motioned to the bit of shit, “I think they know about the hash.”
He had genuine fear in his eyes.
“How the fuck can they know about that?” I said, reassuringly, “And why would they even care?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s special,” he said, and raised his eyebrows, like he was talking about a magic amulet.
“It’s a wee bit of shite!” I barked.
“You don’t know what it is,” he said, and he was right, but neither of us knew, “It might be experimental hash, and the last people who hired this van didn’t mean to leave it behind.”
He checked every mirror available to him.
“There could be a convoy of people coming after us. They might need to retrieve it, because it’s so experimental, and we might smoke it and tell everyone about the fuckin’ experimental hash farm cooking this stuff up.”
I left a wee beat of silence as numbers and formulae cascaded around Gary’s brain.
“Are you sure you’ve not just got your indicators on?” I asked.
For a moment, Gary’s conspiracy roleplay was broken, and I saw him keek down to make sure he didn’t have his indicators on, “No, it’s not that,” he said, elongating the vowels, as if I was the idiot.
When the next car approached alongside us, its driver held the horn down in long, alarming bursts. Gary rolled down the window, and the passenger of the flanking vehicle pointed down below Gary’s chin.
“Cunt’s just complimenting my beard!” said Gary, the swooping wind blowing his words back into the van. He laughed out the window at the car, and dragged his hand through his long, gingery chin-locks, before rolling up the window again.
I kept my eyes on the passenger of the car and noticed they weren’t satisfied by the beard-rub. I saw them mouth some words, lost in the air between Gary’s self-satisfied beard extroversion and their window. It dawned on me.
“Wheels,” I said, “They’re pointing at the wheels!”
As we hurtled down the motorway a little faster than was probably legal, there was something noticeably not right with our van’s wheels.
Gary turned to me, confused. “Wheels?” he said, “What wheels?”
It was almost like Gary sometimes forgot he was in a van, that the world simply moved around Gary.
“I think there’s something wrong with the wheels, they’re pointing at the wheels,” I said again.
As Gary’s face suddenly recognised these words in a particular order having any sort of meaning, something slammed against the front window, and dragged its way up the windscreen, on to the roof and flew off behind us at top speed. Gary let out one short, high-pitched squeal, and a tiny, lonely globule of saliva flew out, landing right beside the bit of hash. Somehow, adult mode activated, and he pulled off to the hard shoulder.
“Something’s flew off the van,” he said, examining the bonnet, “I’m going to have to go back and find it.”
We were standing at the side of a busy motorway, watching Gary stare backwards towards the oncoming traffic, hand saluted over his eyes like a pioneer in a crow’s nest.
“I can’t leave it,” he said with a sigh, “What if the police find it, and they inspect the van and find the hash?”
“You’d need a fucking magnifying glass to even identify that tiny piece of shit,” I said.
Gary circled his eye with his fingers, “Sherlock Holmes always carries one.”
With that, he began the slow trundle back up the motorway on the hard shoulder while traffic raced past him. We watched his bulky frame adopt a stride that was as if his top half was running to convince his brain he was going fast, but his legs were going at a regular walking speed.
When he came back empty-handed, after a long shift as a dot on the horizon, he said it had been the radiator grill from the front of the van that had come off, and got crushed under some cars.
We couldn’t see the van wheels from the hard shoulder, so we drove to the next petrol station to inspect it. Turned out the nuts holding the front wheel in place had simply perished, and the wheel was hanging on to the van through only luck. We had to get picked up by emergency services and driven to our next destination.
Throughout it all, Gary kept the shit/hash in a see-through plastic wallet that contained the tour itinerary, dropped in like evidence, tucked under his armpit.
Later that night, he did smoke it, and it made his chest feel all tight and he got even more confused than usual.
So, yeah, we weren’t really a druggy band. The most we ever really got to taking drugs was when Michael Guitar sucked all the air out of a plastic Subway bag from his lunch and it made him feel light headed.
That was until 2007, when we went on tour with a hard-living, hard-rocking, hard-drinking band called Art Brut.
Art Brut were, and remain, one of the best bands in the world. Fronted by an excitably charming singer named Eddie Argos, delivering songs with a poetic, spoken-word, sprechgesang style and backed up by Pixies-esque guitar riffs. In my mind, they exemplify the frenzied glee of starting a band with your friends, and proving to the world that anyone can do it if you just want to do it, even if you can’t do it (which, by the way, you can).
In 2007, we were invited to join them on a tour of the UK. This was in support of the launch of their second album, ‘It’s A Bit Complicated’, and they’d been signed to a major so were reaping the benefits. That’s called ‘doing it right’.
They’d just come back from touring Europe so still had a massive, luxury tour bus hired which they’d use to travel around Britain playing these 300–500 capacity venues that barely had enough space outside to park it. We’d grown quite close to them, a real mishmash of disparate personalities and energies, but all absolutely lovely. A proper band — a proper band full of buzzing vibrancy, and surprised excitement. Art Brut had a song about being so excited by modern art, the only way to articulate it was to run straight at the painting while it hung in a museum. Art Brut were, to me, what it meant to be in a band.
But they had a dark side.
We’d noticed their tour manager, Jamie, had the band on a tight leash. Apart from herding their members around daily with the ‘break window in emergency’ hammer he’d stolen from the tour bus, he’d also forbidden the band to drink before a time he deemed ‘Beer o’clock’. Jamie had this down to a precise art — he’d calculate how long between soundcheck, gig, and getting back on the bus to know exactly when each of them would be too drunk to do their job. But we’d see them walking around during the day with secret bottles in their pockets which they’d suck out of at regular intervals during soundcheck.
After one gig, I mentioned to them about the bottles, and they grinned, but didn’t elaborate.
Freddie, their bass player, would often take us on to their tour bus to feed us and as we sat on their built-in couches around a large mahogany table which seemed to bely the status of fame Art Brut had achieved, the rest of the band joined us and Eddie, their floppy-haired singer, all charisma and cool, slammed the secret bottle on the table.
It was half gone, but some dusty, pale remnants remained at the bottom of the bottle, and streak marks lined its sides. It didn’t look like alcohol.
“What is that?” I asked again.
“Medicine,” one of them had said, laughing. Freddie drew the curtains, and then dimmed the lights. Collectively, we were all stinking of sweat from the gig.
“You know what this is?” said Eddie, talking exactly as he sings, to the kids, “We take it every day, keeps us going.”
We looked at each other, nervous, curious, interested. Was this something we could do to be as good as Art Brut? Was this the moment The Beatles were spiked by their own dentist? Was this the moment the doors of perception were kicked open for us, allowing us to write an eternal hit record dedicated to a drug?
Eddie reached into the pocket of his ill-fitting, pink 70s charity shop shirt and pulled out a small, cylindrical packet, which he placed on the table. This was it. We were about to become a druggy band.
“It’s called Berocca,” he said, “It’s a vitamin C supplement.”
Their guitarist Ian, all hair and intensity, nodded, “We pop one in a bottle of water and just down it during the day.”
“We call it Berocca ’n’ Roll.”
Eddie opened the packet and offered me my first drug. I accepted.
Jamie chimed in, “Take some, try it. First ones are free. After that, they’re about £5 from Boots The Chemist.”
My bandmates took a couple, and put them into bottles of water and they fizzed, slowly turning orange. I was too scared, so I put one in my shirt pocket above my left breast, and stared at another between my fingers.
“Will it have any side effects?” I asked, afraid.
Ian leaned forward, hushed the room, and everyone fell silent. He inhaled deeply, nodded, then said, “It’ll make your pee orange.”
We gasped. I popped a Berocca ’n’ Roll in a bottle and downed it. The bus erupted in whoops and screams, and everyone clapped. Psychedelic music blared from the speakers. Even the bus driver grabbed my shoulder and said, “You’ve done good, kid, this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.” Outside the bus, members of the public rattled the windows and held up their thumbs in approval. I got alerts on my mobile phone from my nearest and dearest, as well as celebrities, like TV magician Paul Zenon, congratulating me on my enlightenment, and it was on the news later that day too and it also began trending on Twitter even though it didn’t really exist at that point.
However, that night, we played a gig and the Berocca kicked in. But not the Berocca I’d taken. The Berocca in my shirt pocket. It reacted with the sweat on my body as we put on our traditionally over-energetic, irritatingly active live show. Over the course of the gig, a giant orange circle started forming next to my nipple and I would catch sight of it mid-song.
I started to panic, not understanding what was happening to me, having forgotten about the Berocca I’d stored for later. At the end of each song, I’d glance down and the stain was bigger. Instead of realising the spare Berocca had caused this, I assumed I was bleeding Berocca ’n’ Roll from the inside out, or that this was some hallucinogenic side effect.
“I think I’m having a bad Berocca trip,” I said to the audience who laughed, “No, seriously, I think I’m losing my mind on the Berocca.”
I pointed at my shirt, “Look, look, what’s happening to me.”
The audience laughter kind of whimpered away, as they stared, not knowing if this was a bit. It looked as if someone had pissed directly on my chest, and now I was pointing it out to a capacity audience.
“I think I’m having a Berocca overdose,” I said, hearing the words bounce against the back of the room and back at me. “Honestly, can someone tell my maw I love her?”
I vowed never to take drugs again. Playing dress-up as an adult was over.
— —
